European MPs targeted by deepfake video calls imitating Russian opposition
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I predicted this, it didn’t happen. I predicted this, it didn’t happen. I predicted this, it’s happening.Natalie Solent (Essex) · European affairs · Internet · Media & Journalism · Military affairs · Russia · Science & Technology · Science Fiction & Fantasy · Self defence & Security · UK affairs April 22nd, 2021 |
 10 comments to I predicted this, it didn’t happen. I predicted this, it didn’t happen. I predicted this, it’s happening. |
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But most Conservative MPs would fail a Turing test if you asked them about their core Conservative beliefs, and so it’s electronic fakes talking to breathing fakes.
And whatever happened to checking who is calling you and verifying them?
How long until each person gets their own certified bitcoin medallion for confirming identity? (They could issue Putin #666 just for kicks!)
It’s in the Guardian.
The fucking sack full of lying shite Guardian.
It did not fucking happen, at least not the way those lying pieces if shit said.
I consider the Guardian to be in the same bucket of toxic excrement that CNN, NYT, and WaPo are in.
I believe nothing they say.
Nothing.
Shlomo : I believe nothing they say. Nothing.
Me neither – every word [they] write is a lie, including “and” and “the.”
They are to be distinguished from the much more trustworthy BBC, which occasionaly means “the” when it writes “the.’ But not always.
However we should not just focus on the words they write, but also on the words they don’t write. Aside from ignoring inconveneient stories completely, there’s also the delay-the-story-until-the denial-is-ready and then lead with that, which is a courtesy afforded to people on the BBC’s side.
And then there’s the absent adjective as in “MP FOUND GUILTY OF EATING CHILDREN” from which experienced readers can deduce that it’s definitely not a Tory MP.
But mostly I loathe them not for their mendacity but for their smugness.
Once a week I read the FT headlines online. Today I noticed “George Floyd was on ordinary man”.
One of the glories of Samizdata comments is that I never know which direction they will take. TBH, the thing that most interested me about the Guardian story was that deepfake videos are now technically good enough for this sort of deception to work among people who have some knowledge of what the person they think they are talking to looks like, but don’t know them well. How far off are false video images that are the video equivalent of Polyjuice Potion from Harry Potter? That is, the image will fool even close friends as far as physical appearance goes, so that the only way to tell fake from real is what the person says? I’m not looking forward to having to exchange pre-arranged codewords before I talk to someone on Skype.
That’s exactly what I was speaking of when I mentioned authentication by bitcoin above. Just a pre-arranged codeword that tells you you’re speaking to whom you thought you were speaking.
But it’s all far worse than just this aspect. If you’re familiar with the cop-shooting of the 15-year-old boy in Chicago recently, you saw the cop’s bodycam video of the kid with the gun in his hand.
And then, NBC released its own version of that video. They narrowed the shot just exactly enough to crop out the view of the gun in the kid’s hand and then released it to tens of millions of views.
You can no longer trust any video that you see. How hard would it be now to redo the recent video of the Ohio, USA girl attacking her enemy with the slashing knife, but with the knife removed from the scene? Trivial, I’m told. You might get a quick public condemnation of that alteration, but your city is already a smoking ruin at that point.
So, you work to remove the ability to trust in anything in a trust-based society. Sounds like something found in a Marxist playbook for revolution, doesn’t it?
We’re already into an undeclared war.
I am not interested in supporting the Guardian – but Mr Navalny is not a Guardian type.
Mr Navalny is an old fashioned Russian nationalist – the sort of person who would have supported Stolypin before the First World War. He is not a Guardian “liberal” (read Frankfurt School Marxist) at all.
Mr Navalny is sick of Mr Putin’s endless alliances with vile forces around the world – with people such as the CCP regime in China, or the Islamic Republic of Iran regime, or the regime in Venezuela.
Mr Putin does not believe in Marxism – but he is still following an essentially SOVIET policy in foreign affairs. And “RT” pushes Marxist propaganda from time to time – even though it is clear they do not believe in it (“racist America” and so on).
Mr Navalny does not believe that is in the interests of Russia – and he is correct, it is not.
There is chance of the a Guardian style Frankfurt School of Marxism policy in Russia under Mr Navalny – indeed he is even less likely to go down that road than Mr Putin is.
I know this is a tangent, but it really bugs me when headlines are written as ambiguously as this one. It’s impossible to tell, unless you already know what the story is about, what is the subject of the verb. Are the videos the subject, or the MPs? It would only have taken a well-place “that” to eliminate the ambiguity. (“European MPs targeted by deepfake video calls that imitate Russian opposition.”)
</rant>